SAP Business One Professional - Review 2022

SAP SE is a venerable German software maker catering mainly to Global m companies and specializing in cutting-edge databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and financial software, including general ledger accounting. SAP ERP (formerly SAP R3) is i of the most widely implemented ERP applications in the global market place, and sticks to a traditional implementation path typically requiring extensive customization, multi-year implementation paths, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees.

That said, for this review, we're looking at SAP Business One (which begins at $82 per user per month for the hosted Professional edition); it represents the visitor's small to midsize enterprise (SME) offering. We exam it from both the general financial bookkeeping and ERP perspectives. The version I tested was SAP Business Ane for SAP's own HANA database and analytical engine; however, Business One is also available in a Microsoft SQL Server version (in instance you're more than comfortable with that). However, only Concern Ane for HANA offers multicurrency capability while the Microsoft SQL Server version is designed for utilise solely in the US.

Nigh SME accounting and ERP systems still take a modular approach, allowing you to piece together financial bookkeeping, customer relationship management, human resource (Hr) management, and complex inventory management. SAP Business Ane Professional (which is also bachelor at $3,145 for an on-premises Professional user license) has a solid accounting cadre, but integrates functionality in all of these other areas seamlessly across multiple modules (which means yous may buy a lot more than you're really intending to use), such as its benefits administration (BA) module detailed later in the review.

That trait lone elevates Business concern I's complication meter merely the software's focus on supporting intricate and highly customizable business organisation and operations requirements makes information technology fifty-fifty more complicated. If your business can benefit from this level of customizability and you don't mind a heavy upfront learning and implementation curve, so SAP Business I is very much worth the effort. Businesses looking for something a little more simple and designed for the cloud will be amend off with Editors' Selection winners Intacct (on the fiscal bookkeeping side) and NetSuite OneWorld (for accommodating ERP systems).

Don't Think of It as a Dashboard

I tested Business One using a Remote Desktop Connection (RDP) to an SAP server running the HANA version. While this test account was maintained on SAP'southward ain servers, it'due south important to annotation I was working with the on-premises version of the software, installed on virtual servers and hosted in the cloud. The SAP Business One Cloud version is a unlike animate being, one designed specifically for deject-only, browser-based access running a service layer managed entirely past SAP.

That's likely one reason I had trouble accessing my test instance using the browser. SAP maintains information technology is likewise accessible using the Firefox spider web browser, which is currently (and surprisingly) the simply web browser supported. That never worked for me, simply SAP assures me they're working on information technology. Regardless of how you admission the system, the first screen you'll see is SAP'south "Cockpit" dashboard. The Cockpit is highly customizable, displays pertinent user-level data, and serves equally a useful portal for navigating the organization every bit a whole.

This navigation system consists of three parts—a ribbon bar at the peak of the Cockpit, a vertical carte sidebar on the left side of the screen, and the widgets displayed on the dashboard. The acme ribbon bar is an easy mode to parse through records. For example, if you're in the Purchase Orders file, there are arrows in the toolbar to motility forward and backwards.

The left sidebar carte can take you to whatsoever transaction, data entry screen, or report in the arrangement. It'south divided into Functional areas such as Administration, Financial, Sales, Purchasing, Opportunities (substantially CRM), and others including a section labeled Reports. Inventory and Payroll are also on the primary menu. Clicking on a heading opens upwards sublevels. You can enter or view transactions, or generate reports including bones financial statements. SAP Business organization Ane provides three of the four basic financial statements. A divide Statement of Changes in Retained Earnings isn't one of the reports, but it's easy plenty to generate in Microsoft Excel if you really need it.

The Cockpit also provides yet another way to enter, access, and written report data. Widgets on the screen are movable, which means yous tin can add and delete them depending on individual user needs, and there are a considerable amount of prebuilt widgets available. You can also edit existing widgets or create your own containing information you need for your particular position. Hovering on a information point in a widget brings upwards a small screen with more item on that information point. This is defined in the widget, and like well-nigh aspects of the system is editable and customizable. Overall, this widget-way of data representation is typical in larger bookkeeping and ERP applications, and you'll detect it in much of the competition, including even cloud-centric apps like Intacct or NetSuite OneWorld. You can create new widgets using the Pervasive Analytics choice in the sidebar menu.

Two of the widgets are particularly notable. The Common Role widget is a table of shortcuts to operations you lot perform most frequently. I found it a convenient way to prepare a custom set of shortcuts for a specific person, though it would also be applicable at the departmental level. Another valuable widget is the Workbench. The Workbench is composed of all of the documents and reports pertaining to a specific workflow. In the exam company I created for testing, this widget was gear up for the Sales Process and was essentially a flowchart through the entire process, from generating an estimate through the Accounts Receivable organization. There's a small downwards arrow bubble side by side to the icon for a sub-process and clicking on it brings up the reports pertaining to that function of the workflow. 4 workbenches are provided—sales, purchasing, inventory, and financials.

There are two other navigation aids I used frequently during testing. When a chart window is open, right button-clicking or double-clicking on the row number brings upwardly all of the details on the row transaction. There is oftentimes considerably more than data item than that shown on the open window. Some of the row entries will besides have an orange arrow pointing at 1 or more of the items shown in the row. This indicates that you can drill downwards into that piece of data. For instance, on a study showing an inventory item, clicking on the orangish pointer would bring upwardly the clarification, location, and cost of the item as well equally number in stock or if the particular is on backorder.

Regardless of your organizational construction, the business relationship numbering organization is flexible plenty to handle it. SAP Business One provides four default account segments (the overall business relationship, partition, region, and department) and you tin can define up to 10 segments to provide more business relationship granularity.

For my general ledger accounting testing, I primarily looked at the General Ledger section of the overall system, but SAP Business One Professional has equally powerful Accounts Payable and Receivable, Payroll, Stock-still Avails, and Inventory. Inventory in particular is where entry-level accounting systems often fall brusque. Concern One's Inventory system provides the power to apply unlike costing methods on different types of inventory items, and provides kiting and BOM (bill of materials) processing besides.

Multicurrency capabilities in the HANA version of the application are robust, and you lot can go on currency divisions in other geographic areas, converting into US currency at period closing. Business Ane only does this real-time conversion at a menses closing, but can simulate an approximation of the conversion for mid-period reports. Depending on your needs, the disability for true real-time currency conversion at any mean solar day or time might present a trouble, though for well-nigh users the end-of-period conversion using twenty-four hours-of-endmost valuation volition exist sufficient.

Good to Get?

There's both good and bad news for mobile users. The bad news: at the fourth dimension of this writing, the spider web-based version of SAP Business One Professional supports only a unmarried browser—Mozilla Firefox. The skillful news is that Firefox is available for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. However, SAP is nevertheless ironing out this access capability. In my testing, I was unable to access the SAP Business organization 1 system using Firefox, even from my PC.

SAP is enlightened of these problems, has the resources to bring to bear, and knows the value of mobile admission and BYOD (bring your ain device), and then I accept petty doubt that mobile admission will exist up and running in a short time. I would propose, however, if this feature is important to your business, you lot make sure the reseller y'all're working with tin can demonstrate working Firefox access on your devices.

Benefits Assistants

In our deeper await at SAP Concern One'due south other, optional modules and capabilities, nosotros started with accounting and then moved down the alphabet to benefits administration. Every bit with all of the other add-on modules your business tin can incorporate into the SAP platform, the Benefits Direction module is highly configurable for complex and granular benefits plans and packages across enterprises. A subcomponent of the mySAP HR module, the BA module is integrated with SAP's Payroll module and relies on a flexible framework and automated workflows to streamline HR assistants.

The module is broken down into a few key components. For benefits administrators, SAP offers a set of tools that includes an enrollment magician to configure custom plans and benefits beyond medical, dental, and vision coverage. It besides includes an eligibility checker tool and integrates with major plan providers to pull in coverage details. As with BA software such as BambooHR and Namely, the module too includes benefits reporting features to aggregate and summarize benefits data across employees and plans, along with the ability to build custom benefits reports.

On the employee side, the BA module sports an Employee Self-Service portal where users can view their benefits plan and coverage, and make changes to their benefits selections. The module doesn't go too deep into premium benefits and perks, only information technology does cover basic health plans, insurance plans, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), and savings plans such as 401k.

The user experience (UX) is consistent with SAP's design principles, which means it has an old-school, barebones design similar to that of Fairsail HRMS. It offers deep granular customization using SAP's proprietary display schemas and infotype parameters. The module overall is a valuable addition to an organization's all-in-i ERP capabilities, though its standalone BA value and execution is a far cry from the features, functionality, and intuitive UX of Editors' Choice Zenefits.

A Good Human relationship Is Important

CRM is a key component of any mod enterprise sales system—so much and then that SAP decided non to label its CRM functions "CRM" but instead labels them "Sales Opportunities." Customers (and potential customers) are gear up in the Sales Order section of the organisation, imported from Microsoft Outlook, or entered through a Sales Opportunity screen. The Sales Opportunity screen lets you import an existing customer or lead by clicking in the "Business Partners Code" field, which then displays a listing of business organisation partners. Other fields in this tape let you enter the opportunity (that is, what items or services you want to pitch), predictable closing date, and the phase of that sales process.

Sales stages are taken from a tabular array you create that stages the sales process from lead through meetings and quotations or other milestones, and (hopefully) finally catastrophe with an society. Y'all also enter an estimated Closing Pct at each stage. You don't take to go through each stage with every lead, but the closing percent is used to forecast the likelihood of actually obtaining an order. How useful this is depends largely on your own estimating metrics but Business One's arroyo is certainly interesting.

The SAP Business One "To Go" documentation, which is a basic user guide, lays this process (and others) out in item, and is a must-read document for any business considering the software organisation. Equally with any CRM application, SAP Business 1 has the ability to create and manage campaigns, mainly via its Campaign Direction wizard, which I found easy to use. Also included every bit part of the sales procedure is the ability to create and maintain service contracts, customer equipment cards, and create service calls.

Strong Inventory Direction

SAP Business One Professional is plain good at managing a broad variety of sales organizations, simply it's too good at managing light production and warehousing entities—although its abilities do autumn a bit short of those that specialize in this vertical, such as Epicor.

SAP Business One Professional's inventory is particularly well-suited for the small to midsize enterprise (SME) market. However, while it does have some features needed in a production inventory concatenation, it does non provide plenty to support a true store-floor operation. Still, even inside the Inventory module, the SAP Business concern I Professional system has extensive analysis and predictive capabilities.

The Materials Resource Planning (MRP) module, which is missing in several entry-level systems such equally Cougar Mountain Denali Summit, enables you to perform a fair corporeality of analysis and forecasting, and those capabilities are and so strengthened farther in the Intelligent Forecast function. This office uses either "Triple Exponential Smoothing" or "Linear Regression with Damped Trend and Seasonal Adjust" to produce accurate forecasts of your future sales and inventory needs, with the app picking the most advisable method given the amount and blazon of information you enter. This forecast event can be used as input to the MRP Wizard that walks you through the process of inbound the parameters required to generate a forecast on orders and the inventory needed to fulfill them (i.e., purchase orders). Or, if you're using it with the Production modules, then on the production orders necessary to produce the inventory that then fulfills sales requirements. You can prepare minimum and maximum stock levels, and perform Economic Society Quantity (EOQ) analysis to maintain the optimum stock level to meet forecasted sales, while minimizing overall costs and the probability of an out-of-stock status.

For costing your inventory, SAP Business organisation One Professional provides functionality for all 4 major costing methods, including First-In First-Out (FIFO), Moving Average, Stand Toll, and Serial/Batch costing. The Serial/Batch costing method enables you to assign a cost to individual items in inventory, which is essentially Specific Item Costing. What y'all won't find is support for the Terminal-In Offset-Out (LIFO) method, but this fashion of doing things has fallen out of favor then it'due south unlikely that newer, smaller operations would demand information technology.

The Inventory features in SAP Business I Professional are oriented around the warehouse. You lot can specify a warehouse as a drop-ship warehouse, as a bin warehouse, or every bit simply a "warehouse." Once specified as a bin warehouse, however, every item must be assigned to a bin, although you tin can have a "general" bin that can contain multiple different items. In one case a warehouse is set up with bins, every transaction (receipt, delivery, transfers, order of production, or buy) must accept a bin number related to it. Bin numbers tin can exist bar-coded and the system tin maintain Bill of Materials (BoMs), kitting, and pick lists using those bin assignments. BoMs are created and maintained in the Production module, although Inventory, Sales, Purchases, MRP, and Production are all tightly integrated and these features period between the modules depending upon the specific item and transaction a user is accessing.

SAP Business organization One Professional doesn't provide a huge number of canned reports, although information technology does contain the reports you're most probable to utilize oft. And you can specify which inventory-related cardinal performance indicators (KPIs) you want displayed on the Inventory landing page, which is also useful. If you require custom reporting, then remember that the reporting engine for most SAP products, including Concern One Professional is Crystal Reports, which is actually an SAP product. While this is a great reporting tool, information technology'due south not peculiarly easy to apply. And then having someone in-business firm or a consultant versed in this reporting app is probably a good thought.

Overall, every bit with the other components of SAP Concern Ane Professional, I found the Inventory module a flake difficult to use at times. Some of the data screens tin exist obtuse and unintuitive, and it isn't ever articulate what to enter in a field or where to find the required data. Even so, offsetting this is a very comprehensive Assistance organization and excellent documentation for those willing to put in the try.

Above and Across

SAP Business organisation One provides a comprehensive and sophisticated financial system that also easily extends to add the functions of a true ERP system, including modules for production, HR, CRM, and MRP. In that location's even the capability to track projects and perform predictive business organisation analytics by using advanced features of the SAP HANA database.

The downside of all this capability is that the overall system is fairly complex. Getting to a particular function is easy. At that place are commonly multiple ways to get to a particular transaction or report, and multiple layers of drill-downwards, which ways you lot tin can become every bit granular as almost users will want or need. The comparison chart shows about 150 standard reports available, though this figure is a fleck deceptive. As with all of the written report options bachelor, you can pretty much get any type of report y'all want or need.

Notwithstanding, in many cases having all the available report options on several levels tin can make generating a nonstandard report a considerable task. Fortunately, it's very easy to export a report to Microsoft Excel and manipulate it there. Crystal Reports is as well available, and if you accept someone at your business concern with experience in this application it may be easier to generate some of your reports with that. The underlying database of both Microsoft SQL Server and HANA is accessible through the organisation'due south Studio Director, which allows yous to form complex queries as well as generate forms screens and create widgets.

The Lesser Line

An overabundance of riches is not uncommon in SME systems, and SAP Concern One suffers from this "malady" as practice many of the other SME ERP systems included in this roundup. And with all of them, the solution is to get into the implementation with a clear thought of what roles your staff and the reseller/partner will play in installing and configuring the organization.

Finally, 1 of the almost important factors in moving to a system like SAP Business organization Ane is to realize that getting up and running smoothly won't exist quick. With smaller accounting apps similar QuickBooks and many of the newer midrange, cloud-based bookkeeping systems, yous can install the organisation yourself or with the help of your accountant in a few days, and train someone to use it in a only day or 2. Don't await that to be the instance with SAP Business organization 1 or whatsoever of the other midrange apps tested in this roundup, especially if they're built effectually more than traditional ERP-style frameworks, similar Open Systems Traverse.

Realistically, yous should programme for implementation, configuration, and testing to take several weeks. You should also become a clear quote from your SAP partner or VAR equally to how much these services will add to the organization's overall price. To become some idea of what'southward involved in using and modifying the application, turn to YouTube. There are dozens of demos and tutorials, which should give you a decent idea of what you tin await.

SAP Business One is a robust system, and with the right reseller/partner will exist an excellent choice for many SMEs. Go on in listen, all the same, your business will need both bookkeeping and It expertise to really make productive use of the system.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/sap-business-one-professional/17206/sap-business-one-professional

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